Pages

Sunday, December 6, 2015

#TransformHate: On Violence Against Transgender Women

"It feels better biting down"

Lorde

_________________________

_________________________

Someone, maybe me, should say something intellectual, researched, and articulate about assault against women, queers, and trans persons of all kinds, but that is not me right now. This is now. This is personal.I was recently victim to multiple kinds and levels of assault on a train car filled by young cismen. Days later, I'm still angry.

Thought about tweets I made on how my PhD, family, articles, and invites to the White House don't matter to actors of public violence.

If I am found raped, beaten or dead on a train in Baltimore, the perpetrators won't have asked or cared about my credentials.

No one who has ever shouted at me, mocked me, stared at me, moved their children away from me, taken my picture, or touched me in public without my permission have ever asked me who I am.

Who I am doesn't protect me. I have a box full of the names and stories of people whose names and stories didn't protect them. Hate doesn't ask.

In life we are made individual & isolated, in death we are all alike & together; in a box that asks the question: will you be me when I'm gone?

The anger won't heal me. But there it is. Men put it in me like a rapist's child. It's an invader in my body & it grows. For me, the labor is mine, to birth it into something better than those who gave it me.

A feminist friend of mine once asked, "What's the point in fighting anymore? Nothing is going to change." The best I can offer is to say, we fight because we can't not fight. Because it feels better biting down.